The Quest by Pio Baroja

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Produced by Eric Eldred, Cam,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

THE QUEST

BY PIO BAROJA

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH By ISAAC GOLDBERG

CONTENTS

PART ONE

I Preamble--Somewhat Immoral Notions of a Boarding-House Keeper--A
Balcony is Heard Closing--A Cricket Chirps

II Dona Casiana's House--A Morning Ceremony--Conspiracy--Wherein is
Discussed The Nutritive Value of Bones--Petra and Her Family--Manuel;
his Arrival in Madrid

III First Impressions of Madrid--The Boarders--Idyll--Sweet and
Delightful Lessons

IV Oh, Love, Love!--What's Don Telmo Doing?--Who is Don
Telmo?--Wherein the Student and Don Telmo Assume Certain Novelesque
Proportions

PART TWO

I "The Regeneration of Footgear" and "The Lion of the Bootmaker's
Art"--The First Sunday--An Escapade--_El Bizco_ and his Gang

II The "Big Yard" or Uncle Rilo's House--Local Enmities

III Roberto Hastings at the Shoemaker's--The Procession of
Beggars--Court of Miracles

IV Life in the Cobbler's Shop--Manuel's Friends

V La Blasa's Tavern

VI Roberto in Quest of a Woman--_El Tabuenca_ and his
Inventions--Don Alonso or the Snake-Man

VII The _Kermesse_ on Pasion Street--"The Dude"--A Cafe Chantant

VIII Leandro's Irresolution--In La Blasa's Tavern--The Man with the
Three Cards--The Duel with _Valencia_

IX An Unlikely Tale--Manuel's Sisters--Life's Baffling Problems

PART THREE

I Uncle Patas' Domestic Drama--The Bakery--Karl the Baker--The Society
of the Three

II One of the Many Disagreeable Ways of Dying in Madrid--The
Orphan--_El Cojo_ and his Cave--Night in the Observatory

III Meeting with Roberto--Roberto Narrates the Origin of a Fantastic
Fortune

IV Dolores the Scandalous--_Pastiri's_ Tricks--Tender Savagery--A
Modest Out-of-the-way Robbery

V Gutter Vestals--The Troglodites

VI Senor Custodio and his Establishment--The Free Life

VII Senor Custodio's Ideas--_La Justa, el Carnicerin_ and _El
Conejo_

VIII The Square--A Wedding in La Bombilla--The Asphalt Caldrons

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Preamble--Somewhat Immoral Notions of a Boarding-House Keeper--A
Balcony Is Heard Closing--A Cricket Chirps.

The clock in the corridor had just struck twelve, in a leisurely,
rhythmic, decorous manner. It was the habit of that tall old
narrow-cased clock to accelerate or retard, after its own sweet taste
and whim, the uniform and monotonous series of hours that encircle our
life until it wraps it and leaves it, like an infant in its crib, in
the obscure bosom of time.

Soon after this friendly indication of the old clock, uttered in a
solemn, peaceful voice becoming an aged person, the hour of eleven
rang out in a shrill, grotesque fashion, with juvenile impertinence,
from a petulant little clock of the vicinity, and a few minutes later,
to add to the confusion and the chronometric disorder, the bell of a
neighbouring church gave a single long, sonorous stroke that quivered
for several seconds in the silent atmosphere.

Which of the three clocks was correct? Which of those three devices
for the mensuration of time was the most exact in its indications?

The author cannot say, and he regrets it. He, regrets it, because
Time, according to certain solemn philosophers, is the canvas
background against which we embroider the follies of our existence,
and truly it is little scientific not to be able to indicate at
precisely which moment the canvas of this book begins. But the author
does not know; all he can say is, that at that moment the steeds of
night had for an appreciable time been coursing across the heavens. It
was, then, the hour of mystery; the hour when wicked folk stalk
abroad; the hour in which the poet dreams of immortality, rhyming
_hijos_ with _prolijos_ and _amor_ with _dolor_; the hour in which the
night-walker slinks forth from her lair and the gambler enters his;
the hour of adventures that are sought and never found; the hour,
finally, of the chaste virgin's dreams and of the venerable old man's
rheumatism. And as this romantic hour glided on, the shouts and songs
and quarrels of the street subsided; the lights in the balconies were
extinguished; the shopkeepers and janitors drew in their chairs from
the gutter to surrender themselves to the arms of sleep.

In the chaste, pure dwelling of Dona Casiana the boarding-house
keeper, idyllic silence had reigned for some time. Only through the
balcony windows, which were wide open, came the distant rumbling of
carriages and the song of a neighbouring cricket who scratched with
disagreeable persistency upon the strident string of his instrument.

At the hour, whatever it was, that was marked by the twelve slow,
raucous snores of the corridor clock, there were in the house only an
old gentleman,--an impenitent early-riser; the proprietress, Dona
Casiana,--a landlady equally impenitent, to the misfortune of her
boarders, and the servant Petra.

At this moment the landlady was asleep, seated upon the rocking-chair
before the open balcony; Petra, in the kitchen, was likewise asleep,
with her head resting against the window-frame, while the old
early-rising gentleman amused himself by coughing in bed.

Petra had finished scouring and her drowsiness, the heat and fatigue
had doubtless overcome her. She could be made out dimly in the light
of the small lamp that hung by the hearth. She was a thin, scrawny
woman, flat-chested, with lean arms, big red hands and skin of greyish
hue. She slept seated upon a chair with her mouth open; her breathing
was short and laboured.

At the strokes of the corridor clock she suddenly awoke; she shut the
window, through which came a nauseating, stable-like odour from the
milk-dairy on the ground-floor; she folded the clothes and left with a
pile of dishes, depositing them upon the dining-room table; then she
laid away in a closet the table-ware, the tablecloth and the left-over
bread; she took down the lamp and entered the room in the balcony of
which the landlady sat sleeping.

"Senora, senora!" she called, several times.

"Eh? What is it?" murmured Dona Casiana drowsily.

"Perhaps you wish something?"

"No, nothing. Oh, yes! Tell the baker tomorrow that I'll pay him the
coming Monday."

"Very well. Good-night."

The servant was leaving the room, when the balconies of the house
across the way lighted up. They opened wide and soon there came the
strains of a tender prelude from a guitar.

"Petra! Petra!" cried Dona Casiana. "Come here. Eh? Over in that
Isabel's house ... You can tell they have visitors."

The domestic went to the balcony and gazed indifferently at the house
opposite.

"Now that's what pays," the landlady went on. "Not this nasty
boarding-house business."

At this juncture there appeared in one of the balconies of the other
house a woman wrapped in a flowing gown, with a red flower in her
hair. A young man in evening dress, with swallow-tail coat and white
vest, clasped her tightly about the waist.

"That's what pays," repeated the landlady several times.

This notion must have stirred her ill-humour, for she added in an
irritated voice:

"Tomorrow I'll have some plain words with that priest and those
gadabout daughters of Dona Violante, and all the rest who are behind
in their payments. To think a woman should have to deal with such a
tribe! No! They'll laugh no more at me! ..."

Petra, without offering a reply, said good-night again and left the
room. Dona Casiana continued to grumble, then ensconced her rotund
person in the rocker and dozed off into a dream about an establishment
of the same type as that across the way; but a model establishment,
with luxuriously appointed salons, whither trooped in a long
procession all the scrofulous youths of the clubs and fraternities,
mystic and mundane, in such numbers that she was compelled to install
a ticket-office at the entrance.

While the landlady lulled her fancy in this sweet vision of a brothel
_de luxe_, Petra entered a dingy little room that was cluttered
with old furniture. She set the light upon a chair, and placed a
greasy box of matches on the top of the container; she read for a
moment out of a filthy, begrimed devotionary printed in large type;
she repeated several prayers with her eyes raised to the ceiling, then
began to undress. The night was stifling; in that hole the heat was
horrible. Petra got into bed, crossed herself, put out the lamp, which
smoked for a long time, stretched herself out and laid her head upon
the pillow. A worm in one of the pieces of furniture made the wood
crack at regular intervals.

Petra slept soundly for a couple of hours, then awoke stifling from
the heat. Somebody had just opened the door and footsteps were heard
in the entry.

"That's Dona Violante and her daughters," mumbled Petra. "It must be
pretty late."

The three women were probably returning from los Jardines, after
having supped in search of the pesetas necessary to existence. Luck
must have withheld its favour, for they were in bad humour and the two
young women were quarrelling, each blaming the other for having wasted
the night.

There were a number of venomous, ironic phrases, then the dispute
ceased and silence was restored. Petra, thus kept awake, sank into her
own thoughts; again footfalls were heard in the corridor, this time
light and rapid. Then came the rasping of the shutter-bolt of a
balcony that was being opened cautiously.

"One of them has got up," thought Petra. "What can the fuss be now?"

In a few minutes the voice of the landlady was heard shouting
imperiously from her room:

"Irene! ... Irene!"

"Well?"

"Come in from the balcony."

"And why do I got to come in?" replied a harsh voice in rough,
ill-pronounced accents.

"Because you must ... That's why."

"Why, what am I doing in the balcony?"

"That's something you know better than I."

"Well, I don't know."

"Well, I do."

"I was taking the fresh air."

"I guess you're fresh enough."

"You mean you are, senora."

"Close the balcony. You imagine that this house is something else."

"I? What have I done?"

"I don't have to tell you. For that sort of thing there's the house
across the way, across the way."

"She means Isabel's," thought Petra.

The balcony was heard to shut suddenly; steps echoed in the entry,
followed by the slamming of a door. For a long time the landlady
continued her grumbling; soon came the murmuring of a conversation
carried on in low tones. Then nothing more was heard save the
persistent shrilling of the neighbouring cricket, who continued to
scrape away at his disagreeable instrument with the determination of a
beginner on the violin.

CHAPTER II

Dona Casiana's House--A Morning Ceremony--Conspiracy--Wherein Is
Discussed the Nutritive Value of Bones--Petra and her
Family--Manuel; his arrival in Madrid.

... And the cricket, now like an obstinate virtuoso, persisted in his
musical exercises, which were truly somewhat monotonous, until the sky
was brightened by the placid smile of dawn. At the very first rays of
the sun the performer relented, doubtless content with the perfection
of his artistic efforts, and a quail took up his solo, giving the
three regulation strokes. The watchman knocked with his pike at the
stores, one or two bakers passed with their bread, a shop was opened,
then another, then a vestibule; a servant threw some refuse out on the
sidewalk, a newsboy's calling was heard.

The author would be too bold if he tried to demonstrate the
mathematical necessity imposed upon Dona Casiana's house of being
situated on Mesonero Romanos Street rather than upon Olivo, for,
undoubtedly, with the same reason it might have been placed upon
Desengano, Tudescos or any other thoroughfare. But the duties of the
author, his obligation as an impartial and veracious chronicler compel
him to speak the truth, and the truth is that the house was on
Mesonero Romanos Street rather than on Olivo.

At this early hour not a sound could be heard inside; the janitor had
opened the vestibule-entrance and was regarding the street with a
certain melancholy.

The vestibule,--long, dingy, and ill-smelling,--was really a narrow
corridor, at one side of which was the janitor's lodge.

On passing this lodge, if you glanced inside, where it was encumbered
with furniture till no room was left, you could always make out a fat
woman, motionless, very swarthy, in whose arms reposed a pale weakling
of a child, long and thin, like a white earthworm. It seemed that
above the window, instead of "Janitor" the legend should have read:
"The Woman-Cannon and her Child," or some similar sign from the circus
tents.

If any question were addressed to this voluminous female she would
answer in a shrill voice accompanied by a rather disagreeable gesture
of disdain. Leaving the den of this woman-cannon to one side, you
would proceed; at the left of the entrance began the staircase, always
in darkness, with no air except what filtered in through a few high,
grated windows that opened upon a diminutive courtyard with filthy
walls punctured by round ventilators. For a broad, roomy nose endowed
with a keen pituitary membrane, it would have been a curious sport to
discover and investigate the provenience and the species of all the
vile odours comprising that fetid stench, which was an inalienable
characteristic of the establishment.

The author never succeeded in making the acquaintance of the persons
living upon the upper floors. He has a vague notion that there were
two or three landladies, a family who let out rooms to permanent
gentlemen boarders, but nothing else. Wherefore the author does not
climb those heights but pauses upon the first landing.

Here, at least by day, could be made out in the reigning darkness, a
tiny door; at night, on the other hand, by the light of a kerosene
lantern one could glimpse a tin door-plate painted red, upon which was
inscribed in black letters: "Casiana Fernandez."

At one side of the door hung a length of blackish rusted chain that
could be reached only by standing on tiptoe and stretching out one's
arm; but as the door was always ajar, the lodgers could come and go
without the need of knocking.

This led to the house. By day, one was plunged into utter obscurity;
the sole thing that indicated a change of place was the smell, not so
much because it was more agreeable than that of the staircase, as
because it was distinct; on the contrary, at night, in the vague light
shed by a cork night-taper afloat in the water and oil of a bowl that
was attached to the wall by a brass ring, there could be seen through
a certain dim nebulosity, the furniture, the pictures and the other
paraphernalia that occupied the reception hall.

Facing the entrance stood a broad, solid table on which reposed an
old-fashioned music-box consisting of several cylinders that bristled
with pins; close beside it, a plaster statue: a begrimed figure
lacking a nose, and difficult to distinguish as some god, half-god or
mortal.

On the wall of the reception room and of the corridor hung some large,
indistinct oil paintings. A person of intelligence would perhaps have
considered them detestable, but the landlady, who imagined that a very
obscure painting must be very good, refreshed herself betimes with the
thought that mayhap these pictures, sold to an Englishman, would, one
day make her independent.

There were several canvases in which the artist had depicted
horrifying biblical scenes: massacres, devastation, revolting plagues;
but all this in such a manner, that, despite the painter's lavish
distribution of blood, wounds and severed heads, these canvases
instead of horrifying, produced an impression of merriment. One of
them represented the daughter of Herodias contemplating the head of
St. John the Baptist. Every figure expressed amiable joviality: the
monarch, with the indumentary of a card-pack king and in the posture
of a card-player, was smiling; his daughter, a florid-face dame, was
smiling; the familiars, encased in their huge helmets, were smiling,
and the very head of St. John the Baptist was smiling from its place
upon a repousse platter. Doubtless the artist of these paintings, if
he lacked the gift of design and colour, was endowed with that of
joviality.

To the right and left of the house door ran the corridor, from whose
walls hung another exhibit of black canvases, most of them unframed,
in which could be made out absolutely nothing; only in one of them,
after very patient scrutiny, one might guess at a red cock pecking at
the leaves of a green cabbage.

Upon this corridor opened the bedrooms, in which, until very late in
the afternoon, dirty socks and torn slippers were usually seen strewn
upon the floor, while on the unmade beds lay collars and cuffs.

Almost all the boarders in that house got up late, except two
travelling salesmen, a bookkeeper and a priest, who arose early
through love of their occupations, and an old gentleman who did so
through habit or for reasons of hygiene.

The bookkeeper would be off, without breakfast, at eight in the
morning; the priest left _in albis_ to say mass; but the salesmen
had the audacious presumption to eat a bite in the house, and the
landlady resorted to a very simple procedure to send them off without
so much as a sip of water; these two agents began work between
half-past nine and ten; they retired very late, bidding their landlady
wake them at eight-thirty. She would see to it that they were not
aroused until ten. When they awoke and saw the time, they would jump
out of bed, hurriedly dress and dash off like a shot, cursing the
landlady. Then, when the feminine element of the house gave signs of
life, every nook would echo with cries, discordant voices,
conversations shouted from one bedchamber to another, and out of the
rooms, their hands armed with the night-service, would come the
landlady, one of Dona Violante's daughters, a tall, obese Biscayan
Lady, and another woman whom they called the Baroness.

The landlady invariably wore a corset-cover of yellow flannel, the
Baroness a wrapper mottled with stains from cosmetics and the Biscayan
lady a red waist through whose opening was regularly presented, for
the admiration of those who happened along the corridor, a huge white
udder streaked with coarse blue veins.

After this matutinal ceremony, and not infrequently during the same,
complaints, disputes, gossip and strife would arise, providing
tid-bits for the remaining hours.

On the day following the scrape between the landlady and Irene, when
the latter returned to her room after having fulfilled her mission, a
secret conclave was held by those who remained.

"Don't you know? Didn't you hear anything last night?" asked the
Biscayan.

"No," replied the landlady and the Baroness. "What happened?"

"Irene smuggled a man into the house last night."

"She did?"

"I heard her talking to him myself."

"And he must have opened the street door! The dog!" muttered the
landlady.

"No; the man came from this tenement."

"One of the students from upstairs," offered the Baroness.

"I'll tell a thing or two to the rascally fellow," replied Dona
Casiana.

"No. Take your time," answered the Biscayan. "We're going to give her
and her gallant a fright. If he comes tonight, while they're talking,
we'll tell the watchman to knock at the house door, and at the same
time we'll all come out of our rooms with lights, as if we were going
to the dining-room, and catch them."

While this plot was being hatched in the corridor, Petra was preparing
breakfast in the obscurity of the kitchen. There was very little to
prepare, for the meal invariably consisted of a fried egg, which never
by any accident was large, and a beefsteak, which, in memories
reverting to the remotest epoch, had not a single time by any
exception been soft.

At noon, the Biscayan, in tones of deep mystery, told Petra about the
conspiracy, but the maid-of-all-work was in no mood for jests that
day. She had just received a letter that filled her with worriment.
Her brother-in-law wrote her that Manuel, the eldest of Petra's
children, was being sent to Madrid. No lucid explanation of the reason
for this decision was given. The letter stated simply that back there
in the village the boy was only wasting his time, and that it would be
better for him to go to Madrid and learn a trade.

This letter had set Petra thinking. After wiping the dishes, she
washed herself in the kneeding-trough; she could not shake the fixed
idea that if her brother-in-law was sending Manuel to her it was
because the boy had been up to some mischief. She would soon find out,
for he was due to arrive that night.

Petra had four children, two boys and two girls; the girls were well
placed; the elder as a maid, with some very wealthy religious ladies,
the younger in a government official's home.

The boys gave her more bother; the younger not so much, since, as they
said, he continued to reveal a steady nature. The elder, however, was
rebellious and intractable.

"He doesn't take after me," thought Petra. "In fact, he's quite like
my husband."

And this disquieted her. Her husband, Manuel Alcazar, had been an
energetic, powerful man, and, towards his last days, harsh-tempered
and brutal.

He was a locomotive machinist and earned good pay. Petra and he could
not get along together and the couple were always at blows.

Folks and friends alike blamed Alcazar the machinist for everything,
as if the systematic contrariness of Petra, who seemed to enjoy
nagging the man, were not enough to exasperate any one. Petra had
always been that way,--wilful, behind the mask of humility, and as
obstinate as a mule. As long as she could do as she pleased the rest
mattered little.

While the machinist was alive, the family's economic situation had
been relatively comfortable. Alcazar and Petra paid sixteen duros per
month for their rooms on Relojo street, and took in boarders: a mail
clerk and other railroad employes.

Their domestic existence might have been peaceful and pleasureful were
it not for the daily altercations between husband and wife. They had
both come to feel such a need for quarrelling that the most
insignificant cause would lead to scandalous scenes. It was enough
that he said white for her to cry black; this opposition infuriated
the machinist, who would throw the dishes about, belabour his wife,
and smash all the household furniture. Then Petra, satisfied that she
had sufficient cause for affliction, shut herself in her room to weep
and pray.

What with his alcohol, his fits of temper, and his hard work, the
machinist went about half dazed; on one terribly hot day in August he
fell from the train on to the roadbed and was found dead without a
wound.

Petra, disregarding the advice of her boarders, insisted upon changing
residence, as she disliked that section of the city. This she did,
taking in new lodgers--unreliable, indigent folk who ran up large
bills or never paid at all--and in a short time she found herself
compelled to sell her furniture and abandon her new house.

Then she hired out her daughters as servants, sent her two boys off to
a little town in the province of Soria, where her brother-in-law was
the superintendent of a small railway station, and herself entered as
a domestic in Dona Casiana's lodging-house. Thus she descended from
mistress to servant, without complaint. It was enough that the idea
had occurred to her; therefore it was best.

She had been there for two years, saving her pay. Her ambition was to
have her sons study in a seminary and graduate as priests. And now
came the return of Manuel, the elder son, to upset her plans. What
could have happened?

She made various conjectures. In the meantime with her deformed hands
she removed the lodgers' dirty laundry. In through the courtyard
window wafted a confusion of songs and disputing voices, alternating
with the screech of the clothes-line pulleys.

In the middle of the afternoon Petra began preparation for dinner. The
mistress ordered every morning a huge quantity of bones for the
sustenance of her boarders. It is very possible that there was, in all
that heap of bones, a Christian one from time to time; certainly,
whether they came from carnivorous animals or from ruminants, there
was rarely on those tibiae, humeri, and femora a tiny scrap of meat.
The ossuary boiled away in the huge pot with beans that had been
tempered with bicarbonate, and with the broth was made the soup,
which, thanks to its quantity of fat, seemed like some turbid
concoction for cleaning glassware or polishing gilt.

After inspecting the state of the ossuary in the stew-pot, Petra made
the soup, and then set about extracting all the scrap meat from the
bones and covering them hypocritically with a tomato sauce. This was
the _piece de resistance_ in Dona Casiana's establishment.

Thanks to this hygienic regimen, none of the boarders fell ill with
obesity, gout or any of those other ailments due to excess of food and
so frequent in the rich.

After preparing the meal and serving it, Petra postponed the
dish-washing, and left the house to meet her son.

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